Making Decisions at the Speed of Technology

One of the painful realities of delivering technology solutions in  the financial services industry are the long-winded timelines. Building tools for a highly regulated industry takes time, but the real work is getting the users to understand and adopt them.

Most of the mortgage lending executives we work with know that the period from the time they pick up the marketing slick for the new functionality and the time it can be put into use is, on average, between six to ten months.

And this is fastcom – paritively.  This timeframe has been significantly reduced than what we used to experience. There was a time when a new LOS implementation could take more than two years.. We’ve come a long way since then.

Technology is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace, and if our industry  cant, it won t be able to implement  last month’s innovation before it’s already out of date.

We’ve been thinking about this situation.

Tools that are changing the way we work

Our development efforts have been operating increasingly faster for years now. With the addition of new AI-powered tools, the evolution of new technologies has taken on a life of its own.

This is changing everything about the way new tools are developed and deployed. It’s also changing what users expect out of these tools.

It wasn’t so long ago that human QA/QC staff stood behind everything that happened on the loan manufacturing assembly line, inspecting for errors and pulling deals out of automation at the first sign of trouble.

Today, AI offers the promise of highly accurate, incredibly fast and astonishingly smart technology that is better than any human at many of these repetitive tasks previously performed by human QC staffers.

And it’s not just the back office that is seeing results like this. Take customer service, something that is becoming an oxymoron for many consumers. Many consumers are convinced that big companies don’t care about their experience, but switching to another big company will not decrease the time they have to wait on hold for a solution.

But even that is changing.

New AI powered customer service have been programmed to solve many consumer issues for the nation’s large insurance companies. They answer the phone, pay attention to the customer’s complaints, solve the problem if they can, or escalate the issue to a human staffer if they cannot. Many consumers don’t even realize they are talking to a machine.

But here is the real differentiator. While the most efficient human can handle one call at a time, the machine can handle thousands, and solve 80% of the consumer’s problems without ever alerting a human employee.

We’re going to see more of these tools in the future and that has prompted us to change the way we provide software to our clients.

Giving lenders the power to move fast

In the past, updating software that was not built on modern architectures was difficult. When it was ready to roll out, it took a lot of client resources to put it into production. And then there was the change management required to win user adoption.

Because it was so difficult, most companies only updated mission-critical software platforms once or twice each year. It took a lot for users to catch up and remain current. That’s been getting harder every year.

This is why, starting with MCP version 4, we’re putting more control than ever into the hands of our lender partners. We’ll be rolling out new functionality more frequently throughout the year in our releases, but without turning on the tools. The lender can turn them on when they’re ready to use them.

In addition, we’ve already built and deployed functionality that allows lenders to create new workflows and connect new partners on their own as soon as they wish, and have the functionality work in about a day.

The lender’s technology partner should not be a big bottleneck that prevents them from moving faster than their competitors. Neither should they dictate what functionality to roll out or what other vendors to choose as partners.

Our role is to provide the tools the lender needs to run the business they want as quickly as they want. That’s what we’re doing with the MCP LOS.

Find out more about where you can take your own business -- and how fast -- by reaching out to Mortgage Cadence today.

By Jim Rosen, Head of Product Management & Services at Mortgage Cadence 

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Mortgage Cadence: 
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